How YOU can conquer your phobias by breathing from one nostril and keeping a diary, according to the top trauma expert… Can he free our anxiety-ridden science writer NIKKI MAIN from her irrational phobia?

By Nikki Main

I’ve always been afraid of skiing, ever since I saw a slope.

I was afraid of going off the edge, getting hit by a fellow skier and plummeting to my death – but it wasn’t hard for me to identify where my fear started.

My mother was like most mothers: she felt sorry for me when I was sad or stressed and encouraged me when I was in the school play, something I was driven to do because I wanted to be like her.

But when I met with Jones to discuss my fear of skiing, we realized that’s where it all started: I wanted to be just like my mom.

She has been afraid of skiing for 30 years, ever since she nearly died when another skier cut her off as she flew down a slope and crashed, breaking her jaw and falling into a daylong coma.

It’s a story I’ve heard many times that made me terrified of skiing, but as I got older I decided it was time to take the plunge and strap on a pair of skis, but I couldn’t have been more scared.

I told Jones that I hyperventilated as I took the lift to the top of the slope and cried when I saw how steep the mountain was, but I kept trying before I finally cut my losses and decided that skiing wasn’t for me.

Jones said some people experience anticipatory anxiety — or fear of anxiety, and build up the worst-case scenarios before confronting them.

Maybe you have a voice in your head that tells you that you’re scared, or that you’re going to cry, or think, “Everyone’s going to laugh at me,” if you’re afraid of speaking in public; But if you flip the script and imagine that voice as the most boring person you’ve ever heard, it will completely change the meaning you give it, he told me.

This is called scrambling – when you identify the root cause of the fear and change it to make it funny or change the way you look at it.

Jones told me to rank my fear on a scale of one to ten – I ranked it as a nine – and visualized the first time I rode that ski lift up the mountain and told him what I remember thinking at that moment .

I told him I kept thinking, ‘Oh my God, what if I fall?’

He had me imagine that voice in my favorite animated character, but when I couldn’t think of one, he suggested Goofy.

I felt weird hearing Goofy’s voice in my head say, “Oh my God,” on repeat, and when Jones asked me to rank my anxiety, I said it was still high: a seven.

He tried several other tactics, including thinking about my happiest memory and relating it to that moment of skiing, giving myself a hug, and massaging my temples, cheeks, and arms, but in the end that ranking was only down to a five.

We tried the methods repeatedly and soon I began to feel better about skiing – I wanted to jump on a slope at that moment and see if I could – I was miraculously healed.

But by the time I sat back down at my desk an hour later, I wasn’t so sure anymore.

Those feelings were back – the fear was back – and no matter what I did, I couldn’t stop the fear from creeping up every time I thought about booking a ski trip or riding a ski lift.

Eventually I came to realize that I was not healed at all; it almost felt like I had been brainwashed into thinking I had conquered my fear.

Jones said most of his patients overcome their fears by the end of a 90-minute session, but I’m still not convinced.